Amazon Restaurants food-delivery service on the chopping block

The service launched in 2015 in Seattle before expanding to almost two dozen cities and delivered food to Prime members.

The closure of the US business, which was first reported by technology news site GeekWire, will happen on June 24th.

"A small fraction of Amazon employees are affected by this decision, and many of those affected have already found new roles at Amazon", the company said. It is also ending its Daily Dish program, which delivered lunch to workplaces.

To be sure, this is hardly a surprise.

If this is the first you're hearing of Amazon Restaurants, it's also the last you're hearing of it, because the otherwise highly successful company is shutting down its food-delivery site after four years.

Although Amazon is dismantling this part of the business in the USA, the company still delivers food in other ways.

Amazon is closing its US restaurant delivery service, a 4-year-old business that failed to take off amid fierce competition from Uber Eats, DoorDash and others.

This move comes less than a month after Amazon led a $575 million funding round for Deliveroo, a United Kingdom -based food delivery company.

Just some of the food available on the Amazon Restaurants website - for now. The company launched a takeout service in 2014 that let customers use the now-defunct Amazon Local app to order food for pick-up. "The aggregators tend to have sticky customers", David Gibbs, president of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut owner Yum Brands, told analysts last month. That means customers in more than 20 US markets will likely have to turn to competitors like GrubHub and UberEats to satiate their hunger. Shares of Grubhub Inc. soared 7% Tuesday, for instance. Grubhub estimates the market has only about 15 percent penetration.